The Magician of Hoad

by Margaret Mahy

  And at last… at long last… the first, faint transparency moved above the eastern horizon. Heriot had no choice. He must move on. Aching with cold, wet with night dews, he slid to the edge of the dairy roof, arriving at a corner cut back into rising ground, where he crouched for a moment, trying to wring life back into his fingers before lowering himself over the edge of the roof. His cold hands, not yet properly restored, let go before he was ready. He had only a small distance to fall, but it was hard to judge distance in the dark, and the impact drove his knee into his stomach, so that he rolled on the ground, winded. A dog began to bark, but there was no response from the silent house. Picking himself up, limping to begin with but recovering as he jogged, then racing away, Heriot made for the hills.

  Over the last few weeks he had kept silent about his experiences on the causeway. They were part of his own secret nightmare, and anyhow, if they made no sense to him, how could they possibly make sense to anyone else? The subsequent vision in the courtyard had at least had a sort of story to it. But what sense would it make to say, “Something has altered inside me. That thing that used to feed off me, always tearing into me, has been driven out. It’s changed—changed. Now it’s living inside me, pulling me into another shape. I’m changing too. I’m becoming something different.” Though the causeway had been the setting for such confusion and terror, Heriot nevertheless ran toward the sea, thinking of the series of long beaches stretching eastward to Diamond and of the many hiding places they offered. The wet ribbons of tidal shore, running for leagues to the left and right of the causeway, were like roads that might be traveled quickly, and the tide, being a reliable servant, would wipe out any tracks he left behind.

  Beyond the tidal zone, hills of dry sand covered with yellow lupins gave way to deep woods filled with leafy rifts, caves, fallen trees, holes. Heriot imagined himself turning into a wild man of the seashore and living on berries, crabs, birds’ eggs, and wild honey.

  I’m out in the world, he thought. I’m on my own. It’s an adventure. It’s just got to be an adventure. And he ran on and on.

  DYSART’S STORY

  Meanwhile, out on the edge of that last battlefield, strange days were coming and going, like pages being flicked over. Flick! Flick! Flick! What? A week gone by. And then another. In the great tents in the center of the plain, the King with his Magician at his elbow, the Hero with his sword at his side, together with the Lords of Hoad, faced the Dukes of the Dannorad, slowly arguing their way, day after day, toward a peace of some kind. A lasting peace, perhaps. Everyone knew it was what the King was set on, but somehow, after all the years of advance and retreat, battle and bloodshed, the enthusiastic growth of twining hatreds, it did not seem possible.

  Linnet had grown weary of it all. At first it had been new and exciting, but she quickly became bored with the city of tents and all its strange contradictions, tired of the mud, tired of days that seemed to go on and on without arriving anywhere. She even grew tired of the formal occasions when she and her mother were paraded before strangers, just as the King’s three sons were being paraded. There they were, lined up like pieces in a game: strange Betony Hoad with his servant Talgesi; handsome Luce, who might someday be her husband; and sometimes even Dysart— the mad Prince—silent and closed tightly in on himself on these public occasions, almost as if he might betray himself by laughing aloud when everyone else was serious.

  “They are close to agreement,” Linnet’s mother told her. “But it has been decided there should be a break of some kind so that people can stretch their thoughts and turn things over. Lord Glass has ridden off somewhere on some errand of the King’s, and the Hero has gone back to Cassio’s Island for a few days.”

  There was no great break for Linnet, however. She and Dysart were still obliged to study together. They sat with their books and papers around them, pretending to work but often arguing in a way they both enjoyed. Dr. Feo had ridden away with Lord Glass, and though they had other tutors, there were often times when they were left on their own. It was in one of these times that Linnet looked across at Dysart sitting in his chair, reading and twisting a finger in his hair as he did so, and asked him a question that had tormented her for some time.

  “Why do they call you the mad Prince?” she asked.

  He looked up as if he were thinking the question over, and when he turned to look at her, she could see that he was working himself up to give her a long answer.

  “I don’t think I am mad,” he said at last. “But I think I was born to be haunted.”

  “Haunted?” Linnet sat back. “By ghosts?”

  “I don’t know,” Dysart answered rather irritably. He shrugged. “Could be ghosts, I suppose, although it goes back a long way, back before I knew there could be such things as ghosts.” And then suddenly he began to talk, words pouring out of him as if they had been held in for a long time and were glad of release at last.

  “I don’t remember when it ever began.… I think I might have been about three or four years old the first time. I’d wake up in the darkness, all sweaty and strange. I felt as if I was being digested in some terrible gut… becoming meat of its meat, but still being myself inside that meat.”

  “You felt you’d been eaten?” Linnet exclaimed.

  Dysart hesitated. “I suppose so. It was weird. I felt that what was happening to me was really happening to someone else, but I was caught up in it. I do know I was always terrified out of my wits, but even then I knew that no true man of Hoad gives in to fear. So I didn’t give into it. I just clenched myself up into a fist.” As he spoke, Dysart clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles whitened under the skin of his hands. “I held myself together against whatever the… well, the invasion was, no matter whose dream was coming down on me, until morning came.”

  “What was trying to invade you?” Linnet asked, glad to hear herself sounding skeptical.

  “I don’t know,” said Dysart crossly. “I still don’t know. I know what I felt, but none of it makes any sort of sense. I always thought—well, I was always utterly sure—that there was someone in the room with me… someone waiting for something. I don’t mean Crespin, even though he was always there, snoring away in a bed at the foot of my own bed. It was someone else. Mind you, I wouldn’t even try to see anything. I’d just screw myself up, elbows in, knees up, eyes pinched shut. Hour after hour. But once I felt the first light of day on the other side of my eyelids, I’d open my eyes just a chink and turn my head. And then I’d see him, sitting there silently on the sill of my window, face turned away, staring down into the city… just staring down as if he had all the time in the world to admire the view.” Dysart looked across at Linnet and laughed, but not in the way he usually laughed. “My ghost!” he said, nodding to himself. “Well, more of a demon, maybe. I don’t know.”

  He fell silent. Linnet stared back at him. For once she had nothing to say. He was telling a tall story, and yet at the same time she knew he was being serious. He was trusting her with his nightmare. Not only that, she found she was believing him.

  “Go on,” she told him. “Tell me the rest.” For she knew there was more to tell.

  And after a moment, Dysart did go on, telling her, yet telling himself at the same time, listening carefully to his own story. Perhaps it was the first time he had set it free in the outside air.

  “I did try speaking to it sometimes, though not with words. I’d try to get its attention with squeaks and grunts… sounds that were sort of asking questions… that sort of thing. Sometimes Crespin would wake up and catch me acting in a strange way, and of course he told other people.” Dysart shrugged. “Once I was seriously ill, and my ghost suddenly appeared in full daylight, sliding in between Crespin and the doctors, who didn’t seem to see or hear as it spread its left-hand fingers across its own face”—Dysart spread his long left-hand fingers over his own face as he told her this—“as it laid the right hand on mine. Its fingernails were odd lengths, a funny thing to remember. Anyhow, when it touch
ed me the fever slowly drained away. I felt as if I’d been saved. Well, I had been saved, but I don’t know why.”

  Dysart shrugged and stopped again, looking at her half-defiantly, as if he were expecting some derisive comment or question. Linnet still had nothing to say.

  “So, anyhow,” said Dysart at last, “I’d wake and wait, like I told you, and sometimes if I was alone with it—no Crespin or anyone—I’d get impatient and scramble toward the window, yelling, ‘Here I am!” But I could never touch it. It would simply dissolve into air and shadow. So then I’d climb into the space where it had been and sit on that big sill and look out from my room up there at the top of Crow Tower, across the courtyards of Guard-on-the-Rock, and down into the city below. And I’d see what I suppose the ghost had been seeing… all that gilt and glass and wood and stone spread out like a parade. And somehow the sight of the city always drove my fear back into the place where it usually lived, tucked in, all cozy and calm, under my ribs. At times I wondered if the dissolving ghost might be the city itself, trying to get in touch with me.”

  “Didn’t you ever tell anyone?” asked Linnet after a short silence.

  Dysart shrugged again and gave an impatient sigh. “In the beginning I told them over and over again. But who would believe me? It sometimes seemed as if that demon was somehow my only true friend, watching me from that windowsill, giving me nightmares but rescuing me from a different sort of nightmare, something I could feel building out there, and always dissolving when I tried to look at it closely. Morning after morning I saw it soak away into the city out beyond my window, just like water soaking into sand. I did try to tell. I did try to tell Crespin, and Dr. Feo. And a few others they brought to look after me. But they didn’t believe me. And anyhow, words collapsed when I tried to use them. They all became grunts and humming.”

  Dysart stood up and walked restlessly about the room. Linnet knew he had still more to tell her, and she waited in silence.

  MADE, NOT BORN

  At last Dysart burst out, “I’ve always felt I was made, not born… made accidentally. Betony… Luce… they feel like intended men. I feel like an afterthought. It took me a long time to accept that I was the only one who could see the ghost, but by then I’d become partly invisible myself. People began looking around me, and I wasn’t so much mentioned as muttered about. Sideways muttering!

  “Mind you, in the beginning they really did try, in spite of my grunting and crying and pointing at empty air. Because—let’s face it—a mad son! Well, that’s the sign of a great imperfection in any King’s reign. They did their best with me, but none of it worked. If I was given any traditional task—as page boy, say, at one of my father’s feasts—things always went wrong. Flagons rattled. Glasses fell over. Wine climbed up the inside of goblets and spilled over all those lips of silver and crystal. Something uninvited was always walking along beside me, pushing into my space and twisting the world around me. Invisibly twisting it! Still does!” He laughed, shaking his head. “No wonder the whole court sighed and looked away tactfully as I stumbled on by, plates and glasses falling to the floor. Even you heard the gossip up there among your mountains. Almost the first words I heard from you were, ‘They say you’re a fool.’”

  “But you asked me if I had pointed teeth,” Linnet replied.

  Dysart laughed again.

  “Fair enough!” he said. “As for me, back then—well, I toughened up inside my haunted space and started making fun of the world around me. Because there’s always plenty to laugh at, thank goodness. And, in the end, a sort of conceit took over. You’ve probably worked that out for yourself, and I didn’t want to be believed. That demon came to be…” He hesitated, frowning, then said carefully, “… my inside certainty of my own special nature, if you know what I mean. It had something to tell me when the right time came, and when that right time comes I want whatever it says to be mine. Mine alone. I’m the one who’s done all that suffering for it. And the really strange thing—stranger than all the rest of it—is that sitting on the windowsill, huddled in the space where the ghost had been, I used to feel that down below me, down in that twisting old city, the crown might grow straight out of the skull of the King, and Princes, being made of legends, not meat, would never be digested by darkness… not even for a moment.

  Linnet listened, confused, but fascinated too. Dysart looked sideways at her.

  “Sorry!” he said, and shook his head as if he were trying to shake away some thought that turned into confusion when he tried to put it into words. “So,” he went on, “every now and then I crouched there in ghost space, feeling a sort of triumph as I spied on the city, high above everyone else, except for my father in the Tower of the Lion. But then, he was a sort of ghost himself… still is, really.”

  Dysart sighed and stared into space for a moment before going on briskly. “Anyhow, as I spied on Diamond, somehow I found I could feel it all… I mean really feel it all… everything… not just Diamond but out beyond Diamond… the whole land of Hoad—mountains and forests, salt pans, sand hills, herds of white deer in the woods and black horses on the plains… the lot. Long before our Hero, the great Carlyon”—Dysart sounded slightly sarcastic at the expense of the Hero—“long before he single-handedly avenged the massacre of Senlac, I knew as much about Senlac as if I had walked its street… and it only had one… it was all it ever needed… a village of about eighty people, with an ancient graveyard many times bigger than the whole village. Some crowd descended on them—probably Dannorad, though the Dannorad always denied it—and killed every one of them. And then the Hero swept in and killed the killers.”

  As he said all this, Dysart had begun pacing backward and forward, a flood of words bursting out of him. Linnet could tell that he had stopped thinking of her. Now he was talking only to himself, reminding himself of who he was, and telling a story he had told himself over and over again.

  “Of course, the wars were still going on back then, but I swear that over in the Tower of the Lion I could feel my way into my father’s dream of peace, which was growing stronger. In the beginning he hadn’t thought he would ever be King—but war had killed his father and brothers, so when his turn came he grabbed the power of it and began striking back by declaring war on war itself. Sometimes I think his dream had something in common with my illness and that I caught it from him, though in another form.” Dysart paused, standing sideways in the doorway, staring out into the city of tents. Then he swung around to face Linnet, and his voice became suddenly passionate.

  “I’ve wanted to tell all this to someone who… well, all of a sudden, over the last few days I’ve really wanted to explain it to you. I don’t want you to think I’m mad in the way everyone else does. Anyhow, in an odd sort of way I feel you just might believe in my ghost. And you might understand how it happened that, sitting in that haunted space, watching the city and dreaming of Hoad, I came to feel I had a magical life. All right… yes… perhaps I was the mad Prince, but secretly I thought I might be the true Prince… the one who finally becomes King, even though he has two older brothers with dreams of their own. But just thinking that sort of thing is close to treachery, isn’t it?”

  Silence came in on them. Then the sides of the tent panted in and out. The outside world was reminding them that it was still there.

  “Do you still see your ghost?” Linnet asked at last.

  “No,” Dysart replied. “Well, not often. Not in the way I used to. But I feel it in the air around me at times. I feel it nudging at me… breathing in my ear. Feel it brushing against the thoughts in my head, and when it does that, it throws me off balance. The day we met, the day they first brought you into the scholar-tent, something happened to my ghost. I felt the shock of it. Remember?”

  Linnet suddenly remembered the pages flying up around him as if they were being whirled around by a wind that no one else could feel. Dysart seemed to see her remembering, and he nodded slowly. “No wonder they think I’m mad,” he said. “It’s hard
to tell the difference between being mad and being haunted.”

  NAKED ON THE EDGE OF THE SEA

  A few hours before Dysart, Prince of Hoad, began telling his story to Linnet of Hagen, Heriot Tarbas began climbing a hill, hoping his ascent would be undetected. He climbed as quickly and quietly as he could, sliding through long grass, or dodging from bush to bush. When he reached the rock Draevo, he leaned against it for a little while, looking back down at the farm, feeling he might be seeing it for the last time.

  At that time of day it was nothing but a series of black and gray masses, buildings, yards, orchard, and garden. Roosters crowed. The dew on certain angles of roof and wall was beginning to catch the light, and there was a suggestion of movement at one of the doors. It might simply have been Baba and Ashet setting out to bring the cows in, but Heriot wasn’t prepared to wait to find out. He realized he must have left tracks in the wet grass… tracks that, if followed, would zigzag remorselessly to his retreating heels. So, turning, he plunged down toward the sea and didn’t stop until he had put the first of many little headlands between him and the top of the hill.

  By now the sun was well risen. The light, flooding in over the sea and across the sand, was strong and yet somehow a little shy as well, just as if the sun had to reintroduce itself to the land. (Remember me? Shall we dance?) The coastline stretched ahead, unwinding like thread from a spool—a series of looping bays, some of them little more than creases in the series of hard, rocky faces the land turned to the sea. “What shall I do?” he asked himself. And then, “Well, here I am and I’m going somewhere.” And then, “Yes, but where am I going?” There was no answer to this question. He moved on steadily but in no great hurry now, for he imagined he had left the farm and the possibility of pursuit behind. All the same, he still walked above the tideline, first in the light, dry sand where he left no footprints, and then, after jumping from stone to stone down to the water’s edge, along firm, wet sand, certain that the waves would wash out his traces almost at once.